Doubleday Christian Quotation Collection - Hardcover

In a departure from many existing quotation books, two former Anglican Franciscans with feminist instincts have compiled a collection of more than 5,000 sayings from nearly 1,500 people representing all branches of the Christian community who have produced words worthy of quotation from the first through the twentieth centuries. The compilers admit that there are limitations of scope because of language and because not all great leaders have uttered memorable, pithy statements. Considering the book's emphasis on including women heretofore forgotten or neglected, and the relative paucity of quotations from the first millennium, one is not surprised to find more quotations that date from later centuries. In fact, three quarters of the volume's text deals with the sixteenth century to the present, with 42 percent devoted to the twentieth century.

Arranged broadly by century, each author entry--with vital date(s) and a brief description--has a number composed of the two digits of the century and a second number for the order within the century. Each quotation of an author is then numbered. Many authors have only one entry, but many others have a considerable number; a few, such as John Donne and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, have 20 or more. Though one needs to know the century of prominence for direct access, the 150 pages of indexes provide additional help for using the work. There is an index of sources for personal entries, an index of themes for subject approach, and an extensive keyword index. Finally, an Acknowledgments section includes nearly 200 sources from which the quotations were drawn.

Because of the somewhat random selection and the existence of other places to find such information, some will question the inclusion of poetic verses and the many first verses of hymns, frequently the only saying attributed to an author. However, this thoughtfully produced work, suitable for browsing, will be useful in some medium-to-large academic and public libraries, as well as theological and church libraries.

This new collection of quotations fails to take the world of quotation books by storm. Though Ward and Wild, who coauthored Conversations: Meeting Our Forbears in Faith (Morehouse, 1997), believe that "all those included would define themselves as Christians," many of the quotations have no obvious Christian (or even religious) content, such as "I am so happy, I am so happy" (Gerard Manley Hopkins) and "My bags are packed and I am ready to go" (Pope John XXIII). Further, quotations are not documented (aside from a list of acknowledgments on the final few pages). Thus, the oft-repeated "summary" of Karl Barth's theology ("Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so") remains legendary. Unfortunately, only a third of this book is given to post-1950 writers (the arrangement of the work is chronological) and a good bit of the quotable material from days gone by in this collection is, too often, in other standard works. For example, more than half the quotations attributed to Milton are in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Little, Brown, 1992). Granted, there are some quotations and writers found only in this collection, but for those with standard quotation collections, this is not a mandatory purchase.?Craig W. Beard, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Lib.
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